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Images that depict the faces of girls with nude bodies have led to the departure of leaders from a private school in Pennsylvania, prompted a student protest and triggered a criminal investigation.

A juvenile suspect was “removed from” Lancaster Country Day School and his cellphone was seized by investigators in August, Susquehanna Regional Police Department Detective Laurel Bair said Tuesday.

It’s the latest example of how the use of artificial intelligence to create or manipulate images with sexual content has become a concern, including within school settings.

U.S. law enforcement has been cracking down on graphic depictions of computer-generated children as well as manipulated photos of real ones. The Justice Department says it’s pursuing those who exploit AI tools and states are racing to enact laws to address the problem.

A new Pennsylvania state law that takes effect late next month explicitly criminalizes making or disseminating AI-generated child sexual abuse material.

And police in South Korea are on a seven-month push to combat explicit deepfake content, with tougher penalties, expanded use of undercover officers and increased regulation of social media. Concerns in South Korea deepened after unconfirmed lists of schools with victims spread earlier this year.

As part of the police investigation into what the Lancaster Country Day School describes as “disturbing AI generated photographs,” a search warrant was used this summer to obtain an iPhone 11 linked to a 15-year-old, according to court records. The records do not identify the teen.

A woman told police that her daughter said a fellow student had been “taking photographs of students and using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to portray the female juvenile students as being nude,” according to a probable cause affidavit used to apply for the search warrant.

Matt Micciche, then the head of the school, told police the school had received a complaint about the photos in November 2023 through the Safe2Say Something program but the suspect, identified by his initials, denied the allegations, according to Bair’s affidavit.

When some parents became aware of the photos in May, Bair wrote, they also learned that the “AI nude photographs” had been posted in a chat room.

Bair, leading the investigation because the suspect lives in the Susquehanna Regional Police Department’s territory, said there has been shock at the school “that this is even occurring and that it happened within their small community.” She declined to say how many girls had been shown in the images but added that more information about the case will likely be made public in the coming two weeks.

Erik Yabor, a spokesperson for Lancaster District Attorney Heather Adams, said Tuesday that Lancaster County prosecutors had no comment about the ongoing investigation.

A spokesperson for Attorney General Michelle Henry’s office said the agency was not able to talk about specific tips or reports made to the Safe2Say Something platform, which fields anonymous reports from students and others about safety threats.

“Generally speaking, our team intakes the tips and sends them to the respective law enforcement or school personnel for review,” Brett Hambright said. “We have confirmed that was done regarding the matter you inquired about.”

LNP in Lancaster reported that most of Lancaster Country Day’s high-school age students held a walkout on Friday, Nov. 8, marching around the campus and chanting, “Hear us. Acknowledge us. See us.” School was canceled on Monday.

LNP said the school indicated on Friday that it had “parted ways” with Micciche and that board president Angela Ang-Alhadeff had stepped down. The Associated Press left phone messages seeking comment with both of them on Tuesday. A letter addressed to the school community Monday by the Lancaster Country Day Board of Trustees said it was working to replace them and was “still in the process of finalizing the resolution to the case.”

“What we can say is that over the course of the past week the board was made aware of information that led us to the decision to resolve the matter,” the board wrote, including acting “in the best interests of the girls who have been impacted and in the best interest of the school long term.”

The school said counseling has been offered to students and the institution is reviewing reporting procedures, safety practices and other policies regarding student safety.

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SpaceX on Tuesday launched another Starship rocket, but passed up catching the booster with giant mechanical arms.

Unlike last month’s success, the booster was directed to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The catch was called off just four minutes into the test flight from Texas for unspecified reasons, and the booster hit the water three minutes later.

Not all of the criteria for a booster catch was met and so the flight director did not command the booster to return to the launch site, said SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot. He did not specifying what went wrong.

At the same time, the empty spacecraft launched from Texas atop Starship soared across the Gulf of Mexico on a near loop around the world similar to October’s test flight. Skimming space, the shiny retro-looking craft targeted the Indian Ocean for a controlled but destructive end to the hourlong demo.

It was the latest test for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket that SpaceX and NASA hope to use to get astronauts back on the moon and eventually Mars.

SpaceX kept the same flight path as last time, but changed some steps along the way as well as the time of day. Starship blasted off in late afternoon instead of early morning to ensure daylight halfway around the world for observing the spacecraft’s descent.

Among the new objectives: igniting one of the spacecraft’s engines in space, which would be necessary when returning from orbit. There were also thermal protection experiments aboard the spacecraft, with some areas stripped of heat tiles to see whether catch mechanisms might work there on future flights. Even more upgrades are planned for the next test flight.

Donald Trump flew in for the launch in the latest sign of a deepening bond between the president-elect and Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO.

SpaceX wants to eventually return and reuse the entire 400-foot (121-meter) Starship. Full-scale recycling would drive down the cost of hauling cargo and people to the moon and Mars, while speeding things up. The recycling of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets flying out of Florida and California has already saved the company time and money.

NASA is paying SpaceX more than $4 billion to land astronauts on the moon via Starship on back-to-back missions later this decade. Musk envisions launching a fleet of Starships to build a city one day on Mars.

This was the sixth launch of a fully assembled Starship since 2023. The first three ended up exploding.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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